In 1789, Jeremy Bentham entered a longstanding debate about sentience (the ability to perceive something physical like warmth or cold) by asserting that animals have rights because they can feel pain: “The question is not Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”Footnote ¹ Sentience refers to a baseline form of perception, less complex than cognition or consciousness. It implies the presence of senses, but not necessarily the specialized senses of sight, hearing, smell, or taste. While scholarship has fruitfully investigated how Victorian writers distinguish human beings from other animals, this essay focuses on images of commonality across vegetal and human tissue. My goal is not to think about what rights plants have or whether trees suffer. Instead, focusing on moments in which bodies are harmed, I look at how writers explore the mystery of how matter either loses or acquires sentience.

Debates about sentience tend to reflect one of two worldviews. The first is based on dichotomies, on sharp distinctions between individuals, between species, between life and death, and between consciousness and reflex action. The second is a more porous worldview. It imagines sentience emerging gradually, in what Erasmus Darwin calls the “first specks of animated earth,” over the course of evolution.Footnote ² Thinkers like the elder Darwin view sentience as a quality that matter can either lose or acquire.

As a category of beings considered incapable of feeling, plants become a focus of debates about the evolution of sentience and gradations of feeling. Mary Kuhn writes, “We tend to think that sentience divides animal existence from plant life, but the belief in shared sensibility actually connected plants, animals and humans in [the] early nineteenth century.”Footnote ³ The word sentience took on new significance in Victorian debates about the gradual evolution of biological life. Initially used to refer to individual beings, “sentience” also became a physiological term that attributed feeling to parts of bodies, such as muscle or tissue.Footnote ⁴ Theorizing animal and plant life as continuous reflected a desire to get beyond epistemologies that focused narrowly on human knowledge.

Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy exploit similarities between human tissue and plant life to confuse commonplace distinctions between sensate and insensate matter. In “Binsey Poplars,” Hopkins creates defenseless, vulnerable surfaces by comparing the “growing green” wood of the tree to “a sleek and seeing ball,” a human eyeball.Footnote ⁵ He depicts human beings as ignorant, not knowing “what we do” when we cut into the bodies of trees.

“Tender” can mean either physically vulnerable or being sensitive to pain. The line break after “tender” highlights that ambiguity by suggesting that “country” might feel pain. The comparison between the tree and the “seeing” eyeball without its protective socket—round, exposed, and “sleek”—depicts the eye's surface as a zone of receptivity. Hopkins's poem breaks down the reader's certainty that trees are not sentient. Imagining that trees might have bodies as tender and vulnerable as a human eyeball breeds confusion and discomfort.

Hardy habitually uses language we usually reserve for animal bodies for plants and trees. He has a lifelong preoccupation with the idea that trees’ wood and bark are like flesh and skin.Footnote ⁷ In Jude the Obscure, Jude can “scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy.”Footnote ⁸ The Return of the Native includes a storm scene in which “wet young beeches were undergoing amputations, bruises, cripplings, and harsh lacerations, from which the wasting sap would bleed.”Footnote ⁹ Describing the “shrivelled,” “dry,” and “papery” music of the “tiny trumpets” of heathbells, Hardy asks the reader to imagine stages that their vegetal bodies have undergone over the course of six months: “They were the mummied heathbells of the past summer, originally tender and purple, now washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and dried to dead skins by October suns.”Footnote ¹⁰ This naming of plants as “mummied” and “dried to dead skins” calls attention to a visual and tactile similarity across plant and animal bodies. Cut a finger and it emits blood; cut a tree trunk and it bleeds sap. Wounds first bleed and then get covered over with scars.

Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd presents the reader with several instances in which animate matter hovers between possessing and suddenly losing sentience, as when a body dies just as it is about to be born. Gabriel Oak's dog chases pregnant ewes off a cliff and they lie “dead and dying at its foot—a heap of two hundred mangled carcasses, representing in their condition just now at least two hundred more.”Footnote ¹¹ Gabriel is filled with pity for “these gentle ewes and their unborn lambs,” and later Bathsheba discovers the dead bodies of Fanny Robin and the baby that she lived just long enough to give birth to.Footnote ¹² The peculiar status of the dead unborn lambs and Fanny's baby is that they possess a form of potential sentience that has been prematurely canceled out.

This scene contains a moment of visual analogy between animal and plant life. Gazing at Fanny's coffin's contents, Bathsheba likens the dead baby's “cheeks” and “fists” to “mushrooms”:

Mushrooms are among the most fleshlike of plants, and the baby's lack of exposure to the outside air makes the fists damp, plump, and soft to the touch, like mushrooms not quite uncurled. The strangeness of the comparison—the tonal oddity of comparing a dead baby's corpse to the flesh of mushroom—works by highlighting the weird status this body has. Its body has never been fully alive and exposed to the air. As Ivan Kreilkamp has shown, Far from the Madding Crowd is unusual in its preoccupation with animate matter that refuses to stay within ordinary boundaries.Footnote ¹⁴ This is most vivid in these scenes of dead mothers and baby bodies almost born and yet already dead. The ewes and their lambs have not yet been individuated into separate beings. In a grotesque form of being born—being exposed to the world when their mother's bodies are burst open—the dying lambs hover on the verge of sentience and a lack of sentience. Hardy's confusion between flowers, mushrooms, and dead bodies highlights that mysterious status between being and nonbeing. And indeed, writers often explore the porous model of sentience by attending to acts of injury, destruction, or moments of transition from nonlife to life, or from life to death.